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I absolutely despise whoever thought dropping atomic bombs was a good idea. It propelled the whole world to the brink of doom in the aftermath as all the countries began developing their own nukes. The argument of the ends justifying the means are insane when you consider what it actually accomplished. America took one devastating hit with Pearl Harbor. The entire Europe took these hits on a regular basis during the Second World War, and they didn't respond quite the same way. Of course, who's to say they wouldn't have if they had the technology?

Anyway, callous disregard for the innocents who died during the bombings, and the long term effects of it all just don't sit right with me.

If you understand how brutal the Pacific war was, you would understand the points myself, Barnes, and North made.

The entire Second World War was brutal.

The entire Second World War was brutal.

Yes, however, Japan was not going down compared to Germany.   Japan was ready ro fight to the last man and a mainland invasion would not have been a better alternative

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They would have fought hard, no doubt about it. But eventually, they could have reached a breaking point themselves. The act of dropping the nukes didn't guarantee anything, either. If they didn't surrender, would America have continued to drop some more, until nothing was left? Or until their ability to fight was completely eradicated? I'm sorry, but I just can't be convinced the politicians at the time gave two shits about Japanese lives when they made that decision. All they cared about was America's immediate future. Far be it from me to judge with hindsight, but my thoughts on the matter won't ever change

War is an ugly business, so fuck the Japanese for starting that whole mess in Pearl Harbor to begin with, but I will never see things the same way as some of you do.

EDIT: Incidentally, this is how quite a few people in South Africa regard the issue. Bristle at it if you wish, but that won't change anything.

Would it even do much to apologize at this point? o.o

I hate to sound like an exclusionist asshole but my opinion on this is that you can't know what went through the minds of everyone involved. Even I can't truly know what the people who lived it went through. I can infer from someone who did, however. The average Japanese person would have kept fighting for a long time and everyone knew it. It did not help that any allied soldier that landed on Japan would have been baying for blood. What's the alternative to the bomb? A hellish campaign that would have made everyone suffer. And it would have been long. You don't know the Japanese if you think that they would have been easily broken. And quite honestly, my personal opinion on why they surrendered is that they realised that there would be no warriors death. No great battle. Just a flash then nothing.

And nuclear weapons ensured that ww3 never happened. It almost destroyed the world but that would have been far more likely and far more destructive without nukes.

That is your opinion, and you are welcome to it. I'm just sharing my own thoughts on the matter. No one is going to be convinced of the other's position here.

I didn't say the Japanese would be easily broken, however. I acknowledged that they would have fought long and hard.

Oh, and nukes saved the world? All it takes is one madman with a hydrogen bomb to do some serious damage. Rogue powers scare people shitless for a reason.

Even Henry L. Stimson disagreed with the use of the atomic bomb, and thought the US could have decimated the Japanese fighting force through regular bombings and so forth.

In truth, very little about the use of atomic bombs against Japan seemed like it had anything to do with Japan. It was the dawning of a new age in warfare, and sending the USSR a message seems to me to have been more important in the US politician's frame of mind at the time.

Admittedly, though (and I really do hate having to admit this), I am rather glad that it wasn't the USSR who first used the a-bomb.

If I remember correctly, the reason that America put so many resources into developing nuclear weapons was that they feared Nazi Germany was working to develop them as well, based on a letter written to President Roosevelt by Albert Einstein. Fortunately this wasn't really the case...nuclear fission was quickly classified as not essential to the war by the Nazis and relegated to underfunded and understaffed research teams. However, if the Nazis had developed them first they wouldn't have hesitated to bomb London, for example.

The point is, the theory had been developed before the war, and at that point it was only a matter of time before someone applied it as a weapon. Given that fact, I think it's best that America beat everyone else to the chase.

That doesn't come close to convincing me it was necessary to drop not one, but two bombs on Japan of all places, but I'm in agreement with the rest.

I was replying to your dawning new age of warfare comment more than anything...it would have come no matter what, it was only a matter of who brought it forth, and I still believe America used it more judiciously than either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union would have, if either of them had found themselves as the only nation possessing them.

At the end of the day, war isn't about morals or ethics or compassion...it's a terrible thing that we ought not be so excited to get into as we sometimes are. In this case, nuclear weapons brought Japan to its knees quickly and effectively brought an end to the war without a single additional American casualty, and in war that's what it's about. And if it weren't for the fact that other nations developed them, bringing about the concept of mutually-assured destruction, it's very likely that they would have been used in later wars I imagine. That's just the nature of war.

Related, this is an article from the nephew of the man who actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, trying to give his uncle's perspective of the situation: link here

Truman used nuclear weapons not only because he thought it would save the lives of American soldiers (didn't care about the lives of anyone else, funnily enough) but because he wanted to show the USSR that the USA was THE world power and that they shouldn't fuck with them. It was posturing at the highest level, and it cost tens of thousands of lives.

Funny how the US then decided it totally wasn't OK to drop nukes on anyone on the off chance someone decided they needed nuking for their heinous crimes.

So yeah, I do think America should apologise for dropping nuclear ordinance on Japan. Whatever the publicly given reasons, it's acknowledged in the revisionist and post-revisionist schools of historiography that Truman's deciding motivation for dropping the bomb was because it looked like the Soviets would be moving into the Eastern theatre of WW2, and that would interrupt or interfere with America's carefully planned expansion of its own influence in the region.

Scare tactics and politicking. Awful stuff. The argument that it was to "save lives" immediately loses credence when you realise it was "save OUR lives... at the cost of everyone elses". There's no moral high ground in dropping nuclear ordinance on anyone, least of all the position that it was the right thing to do because of how bloody it would have been for the PROFESSIONAL/TRAINED/USUALLY WILLING SOLDIERS had we not killed the oh, tens of thousands of CIVILIANS.

But it's ok, because our guys didn't have to die any more.

I wouldn't think the president, during such a time as World War Two, would care more about citizens of a country that we're up against in a time of war, than our own citizens and soldiers. It's your own people before others.

But, at the same time, I think apologizing at this point just wouldn't do much *shrugs*

I wouldn't think the president, during such a time as World War Two, would care more about citizens of a country that we're up against in a time of war, than our own citizens and soldiers. It's your own people before others.

That is such an ugly part of our history. No matter who you are, as long as you win anything you did to achieve that is alright.

-.-

I wouldn't think the president, during such a time as World War Two, would care more about citizens of a country that we're up against in a time of war, than our own citizens and soldiers. It's your own people before others.

That is such an ugly part of our history. No matter who you are, as long as you win anything you did to achieve that is alright.

-.-

  Didn't the Finns fight the Soviets?